•
Rating: It can take thirty years of a career to discover that when that song is slowed down, it takes on a whole different tone. More spectral, a small open-eyed nightmare. Like the few notes repeated ad libitum of Daydreaming, the new version of the song that both blessed and cursed Thom Yorke's life has that unhealthy allure of their latest productions. A sense of elusive beauty, perceived from the corner of one's eye while a sweet hell unfolds before you, a sense of precariousness and sterile routine, as if the music of this group were now a phantom limb that we feel but are unsure truly exists. A band that lives posthumously to itself, playing with its tropes. A walking dead. It dances to decadence and feeds on its own demise.
All is well, as long as we keep spinning
The label reads Thom Yorke feat. Radiohead precisely because the demigod works on the now cold carcass of the song and distorts its meaning, like a Dr. Frankenstein who sews flesh and gives life to new monstrous creatures. In this way, the singer delights in stripping all enjoyment from the listening experience, distressing us with dilated times and echoes from the afterlife, etching the innocent corpse with lashes of synthesizers that intend to hurt. Just like True Love Waits, the first version contained an implicit vital enthusiasm despite its frustrated words. Here, instead, the sexual exuberance of the young man is frozen in the self-consciousness of the adult who no longer suffers, who in the end somewhat revels in his own youthful sufferings. He looks into other much more terrifying abysses.
There are two issues. The reason for defacing oneself like this, and here it's easy to understand the answer. In a society that devours, minces, overanalyzes, digests and discards everything, deforms, and misinterprets, Thom himself has no reason to hold back from mocking the pop object Radiohead, already extensively used and defecated by the entire world. So who more than the author has the right to vomit on his own art and reuse that merchandise that so many have passed hand to hand?
The other aspect concerns the goodness of the musical operation itself. And here we return to the directions that emerged from the latest album. A dialectic between minimalism and maximalism, with a simple and almost bland guitar on one side, the exasperating slowness, and then a flood of synthesizers from the depths of pandemic depression. A ferocity rarely seen that harks back to the most striking mockeries of the Kid A era, perhaps a daughter of a new boldness of the artist who has opened a new chapter of his life after the death of his ex-wife. Even the solo album Anima didn't hold back. Meanwhile, the project The Smile was born, involving Jonny but not the other Radiohead members.
A remix like this sounds to me like a programmatic manifesto. Where the new music of the band will go, or perhaps where Yorke would like it to go, but I’m not sure the others are so in agreement. Because the vertigo has (almost) never been this frightening.
Loading comments slowly
